THE INTERNET Google feeling heat from other engines

Yahoo is chasing Google closely, but Google is staying on top.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DALLAS -- The dry, esoteric world of Internet search engines is suddenly roiling with the intrigue of a midday soap opera.
Yahoo has jilted Google for Slurp, the Internet librarian that once belonged to the venerable Inktomi. Meanwhile, dreaded Microsoft is preparing a secret weapon that could push it past Google and Yahoo and into the hearts of millions.
"You have the upstart Google, the old veteran Yahoo and then the big bad Bill Gates villain lurking just beyond," said Chris Winfield, author of the Search Engine Market Insider newsletter. "It's high drama."
After a couple of years of heavy consolidation within the search industry, Google remains the darling of consumers who need answers to their ever-expanding Net search queries.
About 40 percent of American Internet surfers conducted searches with Google.com in January, according to the latest comScore Nielsen//Netratings figures. But Yahoo (30.4 percent) and MSN (29.6 percent) are not far behind.
Good year for consumers
That means a good year for consumers, experts say. "The Big Three" will try to one-up each other by introducing better Web searches and cheap add-on services, such as the long-rumored spam-free Google e-mail, they say.
Microsoft is pouring millions into its MSBot (beta.search.msn.com), but it won't be released until late this year. So right now, all eyes are on the friction between Google, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., and Yahoo, based in Mountain View, Calif.
Yahoo may be No. 2 in search, but its Web sites were visited by 111 million people in January, making it the most popular Internet portal, according to comScore.
In many ways, the fact that Google leads in searches today is a product of its close association with Yahoo. Back in 1994, Yahoo's founders designed their Web property as an ad-driven bazaar where consumers would come to shop.
The company never bothered to develop a way to create an index of the billions of Web pages being created. Building and tweaking the software robots that compile Web page summaries is a complicated business.
Rather than plunge into their own "'bot" development, Yahoo's architects hired Google to power Web searches. In the process, Yahoo unwittingly gave Google a heavily-trafficked test bed.
"Really, it was a win for both of us," says Craig Silverstein, Google's director of technology. "Google was exposed to a lot of people in addition to those who already knew it as a search engine. Yahoo did very well by having good, high-quality Web search available."
AOL
So did America Online, another Google-powered partner. With the help of such alliances, Google stormed to the top of the search market. Along the way, it developed an effective method of producing targeted text ads that show up when consumers do a search.
By last year, search engine advertising brought in billions of dollars. Yahoo took drastic action to secure a piece of the market, which some analysts forecast will top $7 billion worldwide by 2007.
Yahoo chief executive Terry Semel shelled out $2 billion for the Web search software company Inktomi and search ad specialist Overture Services.
Google, meanwhile, reportedly began considering an initial public stock offering for this year. The company's leaders haven't commented on the prospects, but Wall Street is still abuzz with speculation that a Google IPO would be the biggest since the late 1990s. Some analysts have estimated it could raise $4 billion or more.
In mid-February, Yahoo dismissed Google from most of its search duties. In its place, Yahoo trotted out a hybrid search technology built around the old Inktomi indexing robot Slurp. And senior vice president Jeff Weiner promised more surprises.
A clear challenge
It was clearly a challenge to Google. And many experts believe the reigning King of Search has never been more vulnerable.
For one thing, Web searchers are proving fickle. A comScore study in December showed that people commonly turn to alternatives for search results. That means Yahoo and MSN have an opportunity to turn "drive-by searchers" into loyal customers.
And, analysts say, Google will have to find ways to build search traffic directly to Google.com without having the established Web presence of Yahoo.
But Yahoo is also showing some inventive moxie. It has already added functions that allow customers to insert news feeds into the My Yahoo home pages.
Its Web mail service is established and running with aggressive anti-spam software. Its SmartSort option in Yahoo Shopping allows users to pull down specific advice for computers, PDAs and other electronics.
Battle of titans
"This is going to be a very heated competition," says Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy. "You've got two big titans of the industry. Google is by far one of the best brand names on the Internet. But Yahoo has a much larger user base and is more established."
To some extent, Google could become a victim of its own success.
"They're continuing to roll out new things and new experiments, but being in the leading position, it's very easy for people now to sort of turn them into the enemy," said Chris Sherman, editor of the SearchDay newsletter.
Increasingly, businesses are finding that minor tweaks made by Google can move them up or down several rankings on search results pages.
"Google really is in a position to make or break some businesses based on the way its ranking algorithms change," said Sherman. "That said, Google is, after all, providing a free service to these companies, so it's really not something where there's a clear right or wrong."
Still, if Google hones its skills, Rashtchy says, it may be difficult for Yahoo and MSN to persuade users to give them a try.
Stays ahead
"It's not that others haven't gained on Google," he said. "They certainly have gained and closed the gap. But Google is ahead of them a little bit, and it almost doesn't matter. Google has established a reputation as the most relevant site, and that cannot be easily undone, even by a more relevant search engine."
Meanwhile, Google's leaders have been anything but static. To blunt Yahoo's debut of the Slurp bot, Google issued a news release announcing that it had added 1 billion Web pages to its index since August, bringing the total to 4.3 billion.
If MSN and Yahoo intend to catch up, the release intimated, they'll be chasing a moving target.
Beyond that, Google is adding ways to access the Internet's stores of information.
The company's news search service (news.google.com), which is still in the test stage, has become a Web staple for millions.